Amazon’s Retailers Are Swimming To New Shores
E-Retailers are leaving Amazon, plain and simple.
Amazon’s tactics may have earned them a top tier position in the digital marketplace, but for how long? According to Internet Retailer; Birkenstock, Macy’s, Buy.com and Gap have been pulling out of Amazon. While these large retailers represent a good sized facet of the marketplace, they don’t even begin to encompass the small to mid-size businesses that have been shoved out due to the copy-cat tactics that e-commerce giants like Amazon employ. If you’re an online business, you may have fallen victim to these cheats for having high volume sales. Amazon and other retailers hone in on big sellers and replicate them; your success makes you a target for the monolith.
Being able to use the data of the sellers to wager on how the market will react gives Amazon a huge advantage when it comes to pinpointing consumer trends, and there’s no question that Amazon has the edge when it comes to leveraging the metadata gathered from its network of sellers in order to create winning product marketing strategies. In addition, economies of scale give Amazon enough purchasing power to drive prices down to margins that make competition unrealistic for small businesses. If Amazon is attracted by the high volume of sales of a particular product, it’s not uncommon to see it compete with its own customers and sell that same product at a price that is difficult to beat and maintain equilibrium as a seller.
Amazon’s tendency to commingle inventories is another factor working against it. Without adequate checks to ensure that sellers are licensed or qualified to sell certain products, Amazon has a propensity to occasionally serve up knock-offs to customers. Knowing they have to compete not only with a myriad of possible counterfeiters but also Amazon itself makes it difficult for small businesses to gain traction.
In order to thrive in this environment, small-time sellers need to shift the paradigm of what drives dollars towards goods and services in the first place, and create experiences that Amazon fails to replicate. One strategy that has worked for smaller businesses is a focus on something that Amazon can’t own because of its sheer size — humanized, quality, customer service. Small businesses deliver experienced agents that can identify a customer’s needs, listen to them, negotiate a fair price, cross sell or recommend compatible products; these are the types of things that faceless corporations like Amazon fall short of — providing when it comes to ensuring a customer is happy with their purchase.
Spl.yt is one of the instrumental moving parts that will power the web 3.0, ensuring fairness and efficiency among online marketplaces. However, we mustn’t forget about competitive advantages on various fronts other than price and data consumption. While Spl.yt leverages new age blockchain technology for inventory tracking automation and affiliate sales funnels, these collaborative features also incentivize competition on different fronts — customer service quality, content creation, price equilibriums, etc — all which benefit the end consumer and removes shark business practices.
